My View: 'Greenpeace Captain' an exciting read

Thursday

"Greenpeace Captain" by Peter Wilcox with Ronald B. Weiss confirms my bias about Greenpeace: wild adventurers doing crazy things to get everybody’s attention about dangerous environmental atrocities in order to convince nations and corporations to stop poisoning and destroying the earth and killing people.

The book begins with a shock: “Whump! A large shiver went through the entire ship ...” Two bombs sunk the Rainbow Warrior in four minutes while it was docked in Auckland, New Zealand, killing the “snapper,” photographer Fernando Pereris.

The drama unfolds breathlessly, with Wilcox, the “Greenpeace Captain” announcing, “Abandon ship” as he escapes naked, eventually discovering that French intelligence agents carried out "Operation Satanique," which, with President Mitterrand’s approval, violated New Zealand’s sovereignty in attempts to prevent Greenpeace from interfering with nuclear weapons tests planned in French Polynesia. The agents served only two years in prison. (My Google search revealed that France continued testing for years.)

This exciting read captured my attention. I devoured 314 pages in two days. So many adventures. I discovered much I hadn’t known while enjoying this action-packed autobiographical tome. After beginning with an event that generated tremendous support for Greenpeace, Wilcox recounts his childhood.

"Was it preordained that I would become a left-wing, antinuclear, antiwar, socially progressive, hardcore-offshore sailor?” His father and grandfather, whose passports had been confiscated after a China trip, organized a speaking tour in response, getting their passports back after the Supreme Court intervened.

Civil rights activism, including going to Selma as a child, resulted in a powerful sense of optimism, purpose and a belief that civil rights and environmental justice movements are connected, nonviolent, passionate and unfinished. Wilcox enjoyed a children’s international summer camp in the USSR and grew to love Russian people.

Because Pete Seeger was a family friend, and Wilcox became a conscientious objector, he served as crew and then captain of the Clearwater, avoided Vietnam and championed cleanup of the Hudson River. He discovered Greenpeace when the Clearwater sailed to protest Seabrook’s nuclear reactor. Eventually joining Greenpeace, he served on the Rainbow Warrior beginning with missions against offshore drilling.

— The U.S. government intentionally poisoned inhabitants of Rongelap Island with strontium, cesium and plutonium from bomb tests, refusing to move them, even after 30 years of leukemia, thyroid cancer, birth defects, miscarriages and “jellyfish babies” born without facial features. Greenpeace transferred all 350 people to Mejato, a safer island. “Nobody else was going to do it, so we had to ... Greenpeace acts to bear witness to these abuses: to shine a light on the terrible things that we do to the earth and to each other.”

— More than a quarter million slaves trapped in Brazil are forced to destroy the rainforest, burning it and causing more carbon to be released than all of the CO2 from all the planes, trains, trucks and autos in the world.

— The “rollover” of immense icebergs caused by melting of the lower part suddenly flipping over in an instant predicts the tipping point of our changing climate. “Unless we quickly make some big changes, our environment will roll over.”

Eventually we follow Peter to Gazprom’s oil rig in the Arctic and details of his imprisonment in Russia. Suspense, adventure and irony. He ends, “I would like to sincerely thank Russian president Vladimir Putin. Without your ‘two-month, all-expenses paid vacation in Russia,’ this book never would have happened.” He says Putin once said that when he’s done running Russia, he would like to drive an inflatable boat fighting for the environment. Wilcox invites Putin to join him.

Harlan Johnson, MS, LMFT, a community therapist, enjoys helping the community heal and grow. He makes his living providing individual, couple and family therapy. He attends Emmanuel Lutheran Church. He can be reached at 815-494-5666 or harlan@actualizations.net.

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